Vegetarian

I’ve been a vegetarian almost my whole life but lately all I want to do is to devour a raw, bloody steak with my hands and I’m wondering what this means because I still love cows, but the distance between a cow and what I think of when I see a piece of meat is fading and I don’t know why. Did you know two opposing things can be true at once? I think for me it’s a hundred opposing things that can be true at once. Maybe more. My brain disagrees with itself. My body hurts itself on purpose, maybe to force me to pay attention to it. To look after it. I’m trying. Anyway it’s pretty loud in my head, and what I’m trying to say is, when we walk down the meat aisle together, you see food and I’ve always seen pain. It is still that way, apart from when I’m cooking steak for you. Maybe it’s because I love you, love tricks me into thinking the meat is just meat and not a cow that once lived and breathed and would have enjoyed a scratch behind the ears. And when I serve it to you, I want you to enjoy it. I want it to nourish you, I want you to feel my love through its muscle fibres and capillaries and myoglobin juice. Maybe that’s what it is. I want to devour love in this way too. Absorb it through my gums, my stomach, my bloodstream. I want it to change my intestinal flora. I want it to anchor in me like a parasite. I want us together forever, long past when we’re food for the worms. And it’s funny that this poem has turned into a love poem because that was not my intention. I wanted to talk about how I understand Schrodinger’s cat more than ever and how it’s difficult being alone inside my brain but love got in the way, the way it always does, how it makes all the hard parts softer, how it makes all the pain worthwhile. I’ve realised lately, I’ve begun to value the sanctity of my life. Not sure when that happened. It’s an odd thing, not wanting to die. Scary, even. Also, fucking beautiful.

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